Voices

Personal, Poetry, Rambles

It seems like there’s no greater compliment you can give a young poet than to say “You’ve really found your voice”. When reading new work, we’re often looking for a certain authenticity of tone, some quality of confidence in the way of speaking. In spoken word, we draw a lot on hip-hop’s emphasis on realness (and for hip-hop’s own discourse on this, just compare K-Rino to Childish Gambino, maybe rock some Das Racist), such that we’re always looking to take someone out for pretension, for middle class white boys rhyming ghetto, and we praise it when someone talks with their own special tongue.

In the past year or so, as a poet and performer, I began to feel comfortable with my voice. That’s taken a long time. Regularly MCing nights has been a big part of it — you can’t spent 3 hours hosting a couple of nights a month and be a massive persona, you have to be at least a version of yourself. The more I perform, fairly obviously, the more I’ve had confidence in my own identity as a performer. And that’s been difficult for me, for a few reasons. When I began performing, I was rapping in a voice very much not my own — my middle class accent had no flow, my Insular Scots undertones weren’t tough enough. And, like every poet, I began by copying the way other people wrote. But, at bottom, it’s because I grew up on a tiny Scottish island but with English parents, which means:

In Orkney, I’m English;
In England, Scottish;
In Scotland, Orcadian.

That’s a line from Visa Wedding, a sequence of poems I’m working on about identity and Scottishness. It’s the most personal material I’ve ever written. I grew up with a voice that didn’t quite fit, and wherever I go that’s the same, in different ways. My English background marks me out in Orkney; Orkney’s Scandinavian inflection seems weird to folk in Edinburgh; in England, nobody has a clue where I’m from unless I ham up the Scottishness. (In Orkney, by the way, we say that folk “chant” when they tone down their accent or make it more English to talk with outsiders on the phone.) Strange, then, that in my poetry I think I’m getting comfortable with my voice when in truth I really don’t have one.

This beautiful article on Obama, written by Zadie Smith in 2009, covers some of the same territory. She talks of her difficulty in coming to terms with her voices, the way she moved between Willesden and Cambridge, and eventually lost her London voice for posher tones. she rightly points out how we many-voiced suffer from the way “Voice adaptation is still the original British sin”. And the she moves on to talking about how the many-voiced and the mixed race seem to be born in a Dream City “where the unified singular self is an illusion”. I’d already been finding myself in her essay, and then she gave me goosebumps:

It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”

Anyone who’ve ever worked with me on project will know how, for all my performativity and ego, I live for the we. I go out of my way to run collective projects and find ways of being part of a WEness, of presenting myself as one part of a collective conscious. Sure, a chunk of that is due to being bullied and socially excluded in childhood, but Zadie Smith has made me wonder whether bigger part might come from the way

this slippery many-coloured tongue
snaps at identity as though it were
an insect morsel lathered with
the sweet-and-sour of BELONG.

Something else has been happening in my life, too. For nearly four years now I’ve lived and loved with an American. (An American, I should say, who feels more culturally comfortable in the UK than the US). I’ve come to understand my own identity in relation to hers, and to her country. Spending time with her family is great for me, because to them I’m simply from the much-fetishised Scotland. And, to avoid being too unfair, they’re my fetishised South. Bands played country music at the dances in Orkney; I fell in love with blues and country aged 18. I love Waffle House. In the South, I gain another voice.

Whan I was an undergrad I had a folk and blues band. We appropriated mercilessly from every culture we could. I sang delta blues. The Aberdeenshire banjo player liked English folk. The Bavarian bazouki-man liked Irish rebel music (his own folk culture being terribly tainted by fascist appropriation). There was a djembe. Once, we played on the radio, and the interviewer asked why we sang what we did. I said that in a way we played the traditional music of other people’s homes because none of us had comfortable homes of our own. I didn’t realise how true that was until my mother listened in and said how moving it was to hear me say it.

So, back to poetry. What does this mean for my apparently new-found voice? It means that, just as I’m starting to feel comfortable with it, I’m beginning to question whether it’s all I’ve got. I’m experimenting more again. I’ve just completed a first pass at a new piece written in Scots, a language I barely feel I’ve a right to, explaining it’s:

Acause incomer will aywis be a clarty wird,
acause this tongue I gabber wi will niver be the real Mackay, I sing.
Acause fer aw that wur aw Jock Tamson’s etcetera, are we tho? Eh?

I’m kind of scared to start experimenting with tongues and forms again, just as I was settling down. I’m worried that editors will look down on it. Experimenting is good for exploring and strengthening poetry, but, especially in mainstream publishing, it seems like it’s seen as a means to an end, as a way of achieving your authentic, settled voice. I’m assembling the skeleton of a first chapbook collection to start sending round, and need to find ways of making it coherent that aren’t about consistent voice. Because, if I’m being true to myself, I don’t have one. For me, singing, performing, writing is all about constructing my identities as I go. In that Scots poem, Brave, I explain it as clearly as I can:

I sing o a Scotland whit’ll chant hits hairt oot dounstairs o the Royal Oak,
whit’ll pouk hits timmer clarsach hairtstrangs,
whit like glamour will sing hits hairt intae existence,
whit haps sang aroon hits bluidy nieve hairt,
whit sings.

Why We Perform Words

Poetry, Rambles

I went to see Peter Arnott’s scratch of Talent Night in the Fly Room (which was an open-hearted blast, by the way, and I’m really looking forward to the finished thing), and something he said at the beginning struck me:

Working with actors is like doing it in laboratory conditions — it tests writing in a real-world way. People say “That’s not funny” and you say . . . “You’re right. It isn’t.”

That’s pretty much how I feel about performing poetry. Performing a poem to an audience is an essential part of the creative process for me. How can I know the words are right until the audience has reacted to them? Why on earth would I trade this for the trickle of response from readers when a piece is publishd? Why would I ask for critical commentary from trusted readers and not from trusted listeners? Why would you?

And if you don’t think your poem is auditory, why do you use alliteration, assonance, rhythm, rhyme? Why do your poems have shape? Do you really not sound them at least in your mind? Do you not roll the words around your mouth? So why don’t you perform them? It will test them in a real-world way.

eReaders: things they do and don’t do

Poetry, Rambles

I was given a Kobo Touch for my birthday. It seems like eReaders tend to cause quite a divide for literary types, so, after a few weeks of it, I thought I’d lay down some thoughts about them:

Things my eReader is good for:

Travelling and commuting. I used to have to take at least three books with me if I went anywhere, because I didn’t know what I was going to want to read and didn’t want to be left stranded. Now I just have to take my eReader! (and one paper book, in case something goes technically wrong.)
Reading in bed, reading while eating, generally reading in awkward positions. You can operate it one-handed and it’s really light — I wish I’d read Infinite Jest on it, because it would have been so much more comfortable! Plus, hyperlinked footnotes. This has been the biggest effect on my reading habits — I generally feel a lot more comfortable while I’m reading.
Free access to all public domain works. This is just brilliant; it’s widened my reading and my understanding of literature, and I’m really happy about that.
Looking up words I don’t know. Inbuilt dictionaries: wonderful.
Reading the news. Thanks to the wonderful open-source ebook manager Calibre, I now get the Guardian and the London Review of Books delivered free to my eReader. Reading a newspaper on an eReader combines the best of reading online news — freeness, ease of skipping, hyperlinking for context — with the best of reading paper news — linear reading provides deeper engagement, reading the whole paper brings up stories and reviews you’d miss otherwise. I’ve become a daily paper reader again, which I really like.
Annotations. I’m more likely to highlight and annotate an eBook. It’s about as easy, but more legible, and gets rid of any “spoiling the object” guilt.
Journals and articles. I can now read pdfs and some e-zines without my eyes hurting! This is really huge. It is vital that more poetry e-journals join >kill author and Nap and get e-book versions out

Things I my eReader isn’t good for:

Of course eReaders won’t replace print. They are a different medium. Some things won’t read on them. Eventually they’ll do poetry well (formatting is too unreliable and rigid currently); eventually they’ll even do high quality colour illustrations; but we’ll be in a Minority Report future before they can do everything a print book does. You can’t do large-scale artistic combinations of text and image. You can’t have big pictures full stop. You can’t make a beautiful physical object.
I can’t lend people books, only link to them. I’ll always want an in-house bookshelf.
I don’t trust eBooks yet. They do not seem to be as well proof-read or as reliably formatted as print. It’s a little like the early days of the mass printing press, when pirating was rife and you could never be totally sure if what you are reading is definitely the original. Publishers are rushing to get e-imprints out, and not necessarily doing them properly. This is a terrible shame.
The Kobo comes with this fucking absurd Reading Life app. I do not want my reading life to be social. I do not want to externalise the rewards of reading with something flashing on the screen to tell me I’ve achieved an arbitrary reading target. I do not want my stats to be tracked. I may occasionally want to post a quote on Facebook, but I do not want everything I do to be shared automatically. I fundamentally do not understand why people use apps like this. I do not see how they expand the world of reading. They contract it.

A little on the psychology

I’m part of the laptop demographic. We are hyperlinked. We stare at screens as many waking hours as we don’t. We struggle to maintain deep attention, but we’re very good at abstract thought and making rapid connections. We are cyborgs, broadly. It comforts our restless, depressed minds to be clicking things and watching screens change in response; we like those feedback loops; it gets the dopamine going. The best, the very best thing about my eReader, for me, is that it gives me enough of that cybernetic drug to hold my attention while at the same time being a form of deep attention: a book. More of the time I would have spent on a laptop, because I feel safe in cyberspace, is being spent reading books. Some writers are scared that eReaders will increase our cultural attention deficit. For me, the opposite is true.

So…

I don’t get on well with techno-utopians who think that Wired is Nostradamus and that new technologies have all the answers. I also have little time for luddites who think that new technologies are ruining our minds. My eReader has made my reading broader and more comfortable, and made different types of reading possible — but that’s an expansion of what print books can do, not a replacement for them.